The moving image is everywhere now, no longer just on cinema screens or TVs but advertising hoardings, laptops, phones. When did it all begin? When did people first try to make pictures move?

It was probably in the ice age, if paleontologists are right in thinking that some ivory carvings were designed to swing on a thread, casting moving shadows on cave walls. Artists in the stone age were certainly fascinated by movement: they drew animals in successive states of running to analyse motion – 20,000 years before the invention of cinema. More recently, in the Renaissance, the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci also show movement as a blurred stream of lines. Perhaps one day, a lost Leonardo design for an optical animation toy will be found – for he was obsessed with the magic of movement.

Richard Balzer’s early animation devices don’t quite go back as far as Leonardo, let alone the ice age, but he has gathered a rich collection of these visual wonders that were popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries and eventually led to the invention of cinema itself.

Now, he’s digitised them with collaborator Brian Duffy, making gifs of the toys in action, showing the hilarious, bizarre, delightful animated scenes they conjure up. The appeal of these digitised Victorian toys is curiously contemporary. To operate a phenakistoscope, you held a slotted spinning disc in front of your face with its illustrated side pointing away from you, into a mirror. Looking through the slots, you would see a jerky but convincing cartoon in the mirror.

Dancing phenakistoscope, England, 1833.

All such toys from the century before cinema use the same principle – “persistence of vision”. The eye can’t separate images beyond a certain speed. If a sequence of drawings of a body in motion are passed before the eye quickly enough, our brain puts them together. It’s a strange, enigmatic mental phenomenon.

These magical toys that first popularised the moving image also include the zoetrope, in which a revolving drum has figures drawn inside that are observed through slots. It’s the zoetrope that is usually remembered as the ancestor of cinema (perhaps because it is easier to say than “phenakistoscope”).

It’s delightful to see digital animations of these old toys – but is it missing the point? The pleasure of these (extremely) pre-digital devices is physical and real. You turn the drum or the disc, and observe the strange flickering motion as it speeds up and slows down.

Eating phenakistoscope, England, 1833.

Turning all that into a smooth digital animation loses the innocent oddity of the original. That’s why the best artists today crave the graininess of actual film clicking through a projector, such as Tacita Dean, whose films resist the perfection of digital and mourn the physicality of celluloid.

As optical toys, like cinema itself, go digital, so artists seek out the original machines as a resistance to today’s bland wash of instant images. While Dean dwells in the past of cinema, Mat Collishaw makes disturbing zoetropes that animate the unconscious.

The moving image is an ancient human obsession. When we look at animated adverts in a railway station we’re just like Plato’s prisoners chained up in a cave, watching shadows moving on the wall, mistaking them for reality. Perhaps the flicker of the zoetrope can free our minds.